'I want to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world,' the young Oscar Wilde told a friend at Oxford. Despite the disgrace and humiliation which eventually befell him, he never wavered from his beliefs.

Years later, in De Profundis, his epic letter written in prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas ('Bosie'), he stated: 'I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does to the full.' And he certainly knew how to do excess. Drink, food, gifts to his lovers.

This scrupulously researched biography is a fascinating work that concentrates on Wilde's sexuality and its effect on his life, placing it in the context of the feverish Victorian underworld of, as Neil McKenna puts it, 'men who loved men'.

The laws were draconian: the penalty for buggery was life imprisonment, with two years' hard labour for 'gross indecency' between men.

McKenna had the full co-operation of Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, on this study and has made the most of what he describes as the 'surprising wealth of material about Wilde's sexual and emotional life'.

He was given exclusive access to the recently discovered witness statements made by the boys Wilde had sex with and he has used them, together with the unexpurgated transcript of the trial of the Marquis of Queensberry for the criminal libel of Wilde. Diaries and letters from friends, lovers and enemies are also used as an insight into the sexual lives of Wilde and his contemporaries.

Much of this material has not been used before and McKenna draws on it to create a convincing account of Wilde's sexual life.

Wilde wrote in Reading jail: 'Some day, the truth will have to be known: not necessarily in my lifetime or in Douglas's.' McKenna's intriguing work goes a long way towards fulfilling that prophecy.